


The Peculiar Sleeping Habits of Adam Parrish (and Ronan Lynch)

by backbones



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-03-06 18:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3144200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backbones/pseuds/backbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan didn't sleep. But Adam did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Peculiar Sleeping Habits of Adam Parrish (and Ronan Lynch)

**Author's Note:**

> Another fic for you lovelies.
> 
> Enjoy. ◕‿◕✿

Out of everyone that would happen to sleep in Monmouth Manufacturing, Ronan was always the one that got the least amount of sleep.

It was tough competition, needless to say. While normal people slept, Gansey liked to create warehouse-sized cardboard cutouts out of small Virginia towns, and Noah was, well, _a_ _ghost_ —but this was _Ronan Lynch_. Not even the Richard Gansey III with all of his manic dreams about sleeping kings and Noah Czerny, a boy brutally murdered before he could turn eighteen, could dampen the reality that was him pulling tangible objects from his dreams.

It was easier when it was just him and Gansey living in Monmouth Manufacturing, with the occasional presence of Noah. There was at least an air of understanding. But Ronan was convinced all Adam did was sleep.

It wasn’t true, of course. Adam did plenty more than sleep. Since leaving the shitstain he still sometimes called home (it wasn’t, they both knew, and Ronan desperately tried to ignore the sad contempt that came with the word, _home_ ), he attended Aglionby everyday, on-time; he still juggled multiple jobs, and never missed a homework assignment. Then, it seemed whenever he was around Ronan, he slept. 

But it wasn’t like he minded, particularly, or at least he didn't the first time he drove to his shitty apartment at St. Agnes.

Adam was disdainful.

He tried to give him a blanket and a pillow, but Ronan shook his head. “It’s too fucking hot,” he said, because he thought if he tried to insult his shitty apartment situation, he wouldn’t press any further. But Ronan never learned, and he would always press further because he was the same Adam that could say _no_ to Ronan even when no one else could.

“It’s a hardwood floor,” Adam answered.

Ronan only stared.

“Hard. Wood,” he said again, this time with more emphasis.

Ronan shrugged.

Even after he turned out the light, even when he had stared through the dark for hours, felt the ache in his back from the floor, sweat through his jeans, Ronan didn’t sleep. Or leave. He only stared through the darkness, at the little sliver of light that allowed him to observe the smaller obscenities of Adam Parrish.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Ronan thought his mind was the only mind that was capable of producing nightmares.

Adam constantly reminded him of this fact. To them it was unspoken, and to Adam, unknowable, but to Ronan, sometimes it was all he thought about: the way his hair tousled around his head like a broken crown, the way his eyes danced under the lids, his teeth white marbles that caught the light when he breathed.

The way his shirt stuck to his skin in the heat made Ronan want to look away, but he couldn't. He never could. It was impossible. And to Ronan, it had an effect similar to staring into the sun: so powerful you can’t entirely see it, and one day, he thought that maybe, just maybe, if he rested his eyes and drifted into sleep, it would burn until it abandons itself into darkness.

And he stared. And stared and stared. But when Adam finally stilled and his nightmares faded, all he could do was wonder what he dreamed about.

What would someone like Adam Parrish dream about? It was hard to tell. Did he dream about his father? His tired and old rugged face, drunk with danger and envy? His mouth with chapped lips, spitting words with a wild tongue? Or did he dream of his fists, grating his skull like fireworks?

Ronan was probably wrong. He was usually wrong about Adam. All he could do was hope Adam did not truly, actually, positively believe that was home.

But if his father’s trailer wasn’t home, neither was Monmouth Manufacturing. He made it clear just as clear he couldn’t live there, though for a different reason entirely. Sometimes, just sometimes though, Ronan could convince him to sleep there at least.

It was the dead of winter, and it was snowing so hard Maggot (Blue Sargent) looked like she was going to pop a vein when Adam said he was going to brave the weather and drive back to St. Agnes.

While Ronan did give her credit for convincing him to stay, she wasn’t the one who convinced him to sleep in his bed.

He didn’t have a nightmare, not this time. He curled himself into a ball, his neck bent toward Ronan like he was carrying an invisible weight on his shoulders. His deaf ear was pressed into Ronan’s pillow, his hair windswept from the weather outside.

It reminded Ronan of those James Dean-types Adam was into, like those magazine cutouts he thought he could hide inside the Hondayota’s dashboard. They all had windswept dark hair, large pearly-white grins that could cut like a knife and very, very expensive cars that screamed both _hot spoiled rich boy with daddy issues_ and _danger._

He caught himself touching the back of his head, where dark strands were starting to curl down his neck. Suddenly he was strongly considering growing out his hair.

Adam was shivering. Not violently (Monmouth wasn’t exactly fancy, but it definitely wasn’t his shitty St. Agnes apartment, where there was—quite frankly—little to no heat), but in the way that made his eyelashes flutter on his cheeks, his chest hitch when he breathed.

Ronan let a shaking hand float above the duvet before he pulled it closer, over the exposed skin on his neck. For a while he allowed his hand to linger there, just only grazing his chin, before removing it.

His face was always sharp and elegant, his cheekbones and eyes giving off something more than Adam ever thought he was capable of. To others, perhaps maybe Gansey, Blue, Noah, and the women at 300 Fox Way, it was strength. It was impossible to know Adam and not think otherwise. But to Ronan it was something different—though not entirely—something different but so connected it was almost all the same.

It was power.

When his father taught him how to fight, he told him strength was nothing if you didn’t have the control to connect the blow. And Adam had all of it—unknowingly, Ronan thought—but he had power in the form of a fist dangling straight over Ronan’s head.

Or really, just the look he gave him when his eyes fluttered awake. They were blue in the darkness, the color of sapphires, deep in the impenetrable hearth of Ronan’s bed. And when they finally focused on Ronan’s face, he did the thing he does when Ronan’s said something that’s gone a little too far, when he wants to try something dangerous, when he drove to St. Agnes for the first time at three in the morning in an old band shirt that was too small for him and grossly stained sweatpants and said, in a voice too small and too pathetic for Ronan to describe, “I can’t sleep.”

_I can’t kill his demons_ , Adam once said.

_Oh, Adam_ , Ronan thought. He was opening his mouth now, probably asking him why he was awake at four in the morning and staring at him like a creep. _But you can_.

Maybe it was different having Adam at Monthmouth Manufacturing, where no one could sleep. Maybe he hated that the one person I wanted to talk to was always asleep when he was awake. Maybe he liked the look of disdain he gave him when he said, “You should sleep.”

“Can’t."

“Just because you think you can’t doesn’t mean you shouldn’t,” Adam answered.

Ronan rolled his eyes. “You sound like Gansey now,” he said.

When Adam shook his head, it was like he was still half-asleep. His hair fell lazily on Ronan’s pillow, his eyes half-lidded. But he was focused. On him. On Ronan. “Gansey enables you,” he mumbled.

He didn’t answer.

Adam closed his eyes again, and for a minute he thought he fell back asleep. He moved closer to Ronan instead, so close he could feel his body heat. He smelled faintly of gasoline, enough to make something stir in his stomach. “What is it?” he asked, “That really keeps you awake?”

Maybe it was the way he said it, his body-language, how close he was. Maybe it was just because he was Adam Parrish. But his breath was caught in his throat. Whatever thoughts he could have formed vanished, left only in a confused mess in his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Night terrors, maybe.”

“Don’t lie,” Adam said.

“I don’t lie, Parrish."

Adam opened his eyes again. “You’re made of irony,” he said.

Adam’s hand found his wrist, and his thumb was rubbing circles were the pulse was. He could feel his heart beat faster. He couldn’t allow himself to be embarrassed, so he turned his back to him and stared into the dark instead.

It wasn’t long before he felt it: a cold hand tracing his exposed skin, over the ink of his tattoo, comprised of so many things Ronan had seen in his dreams. Goosebumps appeared over his skin that sent a shiver straight to his bones.

“You can control what you see, sometimes,” Adam said.

“But not always.”

It didn’t surprise Ronan how Adam just knew, somehow. It was Adam, who thought about anything and everything, that _unknowing_ drove him crazy: Blue. Gansey. Noah. Cabeswater. College. Sometimes, death, and not the kind of death Ronan believed in a year ago. It was the kind of death that was the most terrifying, that Noah saw everyday, that they might see if they could never let go of the magic of Cabeswater.

Once, somewhere between the brink of sleep and being awake, Adam told him as much: _Sometimes, I think about it, how some day, we might all just be ghosts_.

He couldn't imagine it. Did he want to spend the rest of eternity with Gansey, Blue, Noah and Adam? Exploring Cabeswater, running amuck in Henrietta? He thought of Noah, who still smelled like the place of his death, that while he _said_ he was dead still didn't quite understand it. 

He sat up and turned to Adam. “Stay. At Monmouth,” he said. The words were jumbled and they sounded like they came all at once.

Adam shook his head. He would always be stubborn. “No,” he said, and for a moment Ronan thought that was the end of the conversation, like it usually was. But then Adam said, quieter, like Ronan wasn’t supposed to hear, "I won't belong to you.”

Ronan shook his head. He let himself settle into the bed again. He pulled Adam closer. His morning breath was on his.

He didn’t realize it, but he was laughing, the kind of laugh that was breathy and wild, and way too loud for four AM.

Adam was staring at him, this time, wide-eyed, his chapped lips parted like he were saying,  _what are you doing, Lynch? What are you thinking? What kind of dangerous thing are you thinking of, this time?_

It was exhilarating.

"You won't," Ronan said. "I already belong to you."

 

*


End file.
